Mary Hays's 'Female Biography': Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism [Paperback]

Introduction  1. I Sought & Made to Myself an Extraordinary Destiny   2. The Trial(s) of Queen Caroline and Hayss Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated  3. The Turbulent Seas of Cultural Sisterhood: French Connections in Mary Hayss Female Biography (1803)  4. Lost in Translation: Mary Hays Reads Heloise  5. The Spanish Monarchy in Mary Hayss Biographical Works  6. Mary Hayss Female Biography: Feminist Remix  7. Rioting in Intellectual Luxury: The Innovations and Influence of Mary Hayss Catherine Macaulay Graham    8. The Very Worst Woman I Ever Heard of : Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Biography as Vindication  9. Womens Writing on Womens Writing : Mayy Ziyadas Literary Biographies as Egyptian Feminist History

The essays included in Mary Hayss Female Biography: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hayss work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hayss larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hayss attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the universe of knowledge then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Haysl³#